My recent trip to Florida, to the Social Marketing conference there hosted by USF, demonstrated some very clear things to me. Firstly, the need for behaviour change activities isn’t going anywhere. People are overweight. They eat badly. The health of the planet is in danger. The hotel hosting the conference was freezing cold from too much air conditioning, delegates and hotel guests drank bottle after bottle of water despite the water fountains on every floor, all the (often low fat and high sugar) food was packaged in plastic and the coffee takeaway cups were ‘chosen’ despite the availability of washable china ones. People behave in ways which damage their own and the planet’s wellbeing. This needs to change.

The other thing that was hammered home to me was that social marketing has a genuine contribution to make. As a practice theorist, it is easy to dismiss social marketing as being ineffectual or superficial; untheoretical, expensive and a contributor to the ‘individualist’ tendencies of government policy makers who tend to support downstream individually-focused behaviour change activities to avoid the need for regulation and criticism of upstream corporate activities. But social marketing is inherently practical. It is established, tested, done. Above all it is systematic; based on an inherent understanding of how to strategically identify and shift fairly simple behaviours in a more helpful direction of travel. It uses strategic planning approaches, marketing techniques and business tactics like stakeholder relationship management, goals-setting and evaluation.

Where social marketing falls down is when it over-reaches. It is a tendency of single-approach conferences to take part in a bit of back-patting, and that certainly went on. There was a fair amount of self-congratulation for all the ‘good work’ people were doing, as evidenced by the range of case studies on show. My keynote warned against this over-reaching, and put forward a case for transdisciplinary thinking. I presented social practice theory as a potential framework for seeing ‘behaviour’ through a new lens and for considering the role of social marketing from a transdisciplinary perspective; i.e. one where the goal of practice shift (or social change, whatever term you prefer) comes first, and a consideration of how each discipline might contributes comes second.​Of course, there are other benefits to practice theory, like the fact that the individual is removed from centre stage and the practice is the unit of analysis. This leads to a different way of thinking about intervention; one which might not be politically convenient in neoliberal systems, but one which backgrounds rather than foregrounds the power of individuals to make sustainable changes when the systems of practice in which they operate remain largely unchanged.

The beauty of social marketing is that it is practical and applied. If there was any voiced (or unvoiced) wariness about my keynote from delegates, it was ‘where is the evidence?’ How can we apply social practice theory to social change initiatives. “Show me examples”, the crowd bayed.

Well, I can’t. Not many, anyway. And that is where we are. My goal is to return to this conference in two years having developed and tested a strategic management approach to practice-based social change. A first thought on this includes the following:- The approach must be step by step, drawing on systematic social marketing planning processes. - The starting point is analysis of practice and bundles of practice. There must be a critical analysis of the role of social marketing. - There must be a critical analysis of other disciplines which should be involved and a plan for developing transdisciplinary partnerships. - There must be a consideration of constraints (budgetary and time) which might restrict the involvement of other disciplines. Reports should all include a statement about which disciplines should be involved. - The links between elements of practice and bundles of practice would be used as ‘levers for change’ and as a map for identifying where change can be achieved and where social marketing is unlikely to affect change within the practice system.- Evaluation would refer back to this map as a way of conceptualising the limitations of any stand-alone social marketing initiative. - The benchmark criteria for social marketing (and the scorecard, recently developed by Rundle-Thiele and colleagues) can still operate within this systematic approach.